Ableton Live 9: Six Follow Action Tips

askaudiomag.com May 8, 2015

If you've never used Ableton Live's Follow Actions before then be prepared to

have your mind blown with these 6 ways to use them by Ableton Certified

Trainer, Noah Pred.

Did you know you can program instructions into Live's Session view clips that

will tell those clips to play for a specified period of time before playing another

carefully specified clipor a randomly selected one? In this tutorial, we'll explore

six exciting usages of Live's under-utilized but highly powerful follow actions for

use in both performance and production.

Configuring Clips for Follow Actions

First thing you need to know is that follow actions can only be programmed to

control a group of clips on a single track. What do I mean by a group of clips? A

group of clips are vertically contiguousin other words, direct neighbors above

and below one another, not separated by an empty clip slot. In the picture below,

we have two groups of clips on a single audio track: the purple clips are in one

group; below, separated by an empty clip slot, the blue clips constitute a separate

clip group. Before going further, it's worth mentioning that follow actions behave

identically for MIDI clips as they do for audio clips.

Two clip

groups on an audio track.

Now that we've got these clips organized into groups, we can set about

configuring our follow actions. It's important to set these up before any clips in

the group have been triggered, or the follow actions may not take hold as

expected. In theory, you could set follow actions up on the fly so long as you

haven't triggered any of the clips in question yet, but as you'll see, it's advisable

to set them up in advance.

A clip's follow action properties are located in the launch panel of a clip's

settings: in a clip's detail view, click the L button in the lower left corner so

that it lights up. You should now see a Launch properties pane, the bottom third

of which is devoted to follow action settings.

The Launch

properties pane of a one-shot clip, without follow actions configured.

At the top of the follow action settings are three boxes that allow you to specify

how long the clip, looping or not, will playin bars, beats, and sixteenth notes,

respectivelybefore assuming the specified follow action.

Beneath this are two drop-down menus with an identical set of options. The first

is to take no action, which is the default settingmeaning the clip will continue

to play as normal. You can tell the clip to stop, or to play itself again. It can be

made to play the previous clip, or the one above it in the group; the next clip,

which is the one below it; to play the first or top clip in the group; the last or

bottom clip in the group; any random clip in the group including itself, or any

other random clip in the group, excluding itself.

The follow

action menu.

This already opens up a world of possibilities to program intricate sequences,

randomize playback, or create a balance of the two by injecting randomized fills

into steady patterns. But why are there two identical follow action menus side by

side?

Beneath each of these menus is a numerical field that determines a probability

that the follow action selected above it will be takenso rather than leave

selections to be completely randomized, you can create your own weighted

gambles between two specific options.

When either of the action menus' probability is set to zero, it will never be

triggered. If the left action is set to two and the right action is set to one, the left

action will occur twice as often. However, each numerical field can be set from

zero to 999, allowing for all sorts of odd fractional ratios worth experimenting

with. Let's get to it then, shall we?

Cascading Clip Sequence

To quickly configure the same follow actions for an entire clip group, first select

all the clips in the group using the Shift key; now you can program your follow

actions for all selected clips simultaneously.

For this first example, I've simply taken four drum clips and told them each to

play the next clip in the group after two bars. When the bottom clip of a group is

playing, the next clip instruction triggers the top clip of the group again, which

means that each clip in this group will play for two bars, completing an eight bar

cycle before starting over.

Cascading clip sequence follow action settings.

Naturally, each clip could be told to play for any length of time and you could

include more clips in this way as needed.

Weighted Fills

To create probabilistic drum fills, I'll have the top clip in a group of three clips

play for 3 bars and 3 quarter notes. Below this are two fill clips, each a single

quarter note in length which have both been programmed to play for one quarter

note before playing the top clip in the group again. The top clip will play either

the next fill clip immediate below it, or the second fill clip at the bottom of the

group, but I'd like it to play the first fill clip more often than the second, so I'll

weight the ratio accordingly.

Weighted fill settings from the top clip.

Randomized Fills

To create fully randomized fills less often from a wider selection of clips, I'll take

a main drum loop and ten half-bar fills. The top clip will be set to play for 7 bars

and 2 quarter notes before playing any other clip in the group. Meanwhile, I'll

select all the fill clips simultaneouslybeing careful not to select the main drum

clip up topand set them all to play for 2 quarter notes before the first clip in the

group, setting playback to the top clip again.

Settings for the main clip at the top of the group.

Settings for the randomized fill clips.

Beat Juggling

For this next example, I'll take a set of five breakbeat loops and have each of

them to play for either 2, 3, 4, or 5 quarter notes before playing any other

random clip in the group. The important thing hereaside from them all being

warped properly, of courseis to have the Legato box below the Launch Mode

drop-down menu enabled. This makes it so that each breakbeat, once triggered,

picks up playback at the current playback interval rather than starting on the

first downbeat as it would by default. The result in this case is that while each

drum clip is being triggered for playback at odd intervals, they'll all stay locked

in rhythm with the main clock, resulting in beats being juggled at odd intervals

while maintaining their core rhythmicity.

Legato switched on for a beat clip that will play for five

quarter notes before playing another clip in the group.

Unwarped Looping

While Ableton's warping algorithms are better than ever and in many cases

sound pristine, some people prefer to not warp their audio clips at all. If you

want to have a clip play back at a repetitive interval, such as sixteenth, eight, or

quarter notes or even three sixteen or eight notes for a hemiola feel you can

easily configure this using follow actions. For a basic example I'll take a bass

drum sample and turn the warping off so there's no time-stretching whatsoever.

Then I'll use the follow actions to tell it to play itself every quarter note, resulting

in a pulsing 4/4 kick without any looping enabled.

Retriggered

quarter note unwarped kick drum.

Randomized Patterns

You can also use follow actions to randomly generate new loops from one shots

or longer clips. Simply select all the clips in your group and tell them to play a

random clip from the groupincluding or excluding itself, as either work can

work in this set up depending what you're going forat whatever interval you

need. To create rhythmic patterns out of drum or other short one shots, you'll

want to select one, two or three sixteenth notes; to trigger, say, dubby effect

shots, you might only want them to happen every four, eight, or sixteen barsor

even further apart, or at less standard intervals.

Eight one-

shot clips configured for randomized rhythmic playback with a chance of

retriggering. PRO-TIP: Create unique clips out of thin air by recording randomized patterns into a new audio

track: record the randomization until you've heard a few segments you think might be useful, then

select the desired section for playback with the recorded clip's loop brace.

Follow actions will be recorded into the arrangement as discrete clips, triggered

as programmed. Whether generating unique patterns in the studio or injecting

some randomization into otherwise repetitive loops to spice things up on stage,

follow actions are a powerful feature built into Live's clips that every Live user

should know how to use.